by Ouida
Those gleams of blue on the battlements, what use were they? and as for the clouds — they were always holding off when they were wanted, and coming down when rain was ruin. But as for turnips and beans — about their preciousness there could be no manner of doubt. And she taught the priority of the claims of the soup‐pot with a thick cudgel, as the world teaches it to the poet. The poet often learns the lesson, and puts his conscience in to stew, as if it were an onion; finding philosophy will bake no bread.
But no beating could cure Signa of looking at the frescoes, and hearing the angels singing in the clouds above.
Signa was not as other children were. To Nita he seemed more foolish and more worthless than any of them, and she despised him.
“You cannot beat the gates down nor the clouds,” said Signa, when she thrashed him, and that comforted him. But such an answer seemed to Nita the very pertinacy of the Evil One himself.
“He was an obstinate little beast,” said Nita, “and if it were not for that half of Bruno’s land ‐”
But he was not obstinate. He only stretched towards the light he saw, as the plant in the cellar will stretch through the bars.
Tens of millions of little peasants come to the birth, and grow up and become men, and do the daily bidding of the world, and work and die, and have no more of soul or Godhead in them than the grains of sand. But here and there, with no lot different to his fellows, one is born to dream and muse and struggle to the sun of higher desires, and the world calls such a one Burns, or Haydn, or Giotto, or Shakespeare, or whatever name the fierce light of fame may burn upon and make iridescent irredescent .
Some other relaxations and enjoyments too the child found; and here and there people were good to him; women for the sake of his pretty innocent face, with the cloud of dusky golden hair tumbling half over it always, and priests for the sake of his voice, which gave such beauty to their services, when anything great happened to demand a full ceremonial in their dark, quiet, frescoed sanctuaries scattered under the hills and on them. Indeed Lippo would have taken him into the city, and made money of his singing in the celebrations at Easter time, or on Ascension Day, or in Holy Week at the grand ceremonies of Rome. But of that Bruno would never hear. He set his heel down on the ground with an oath.
“Sell your soul, if you please, and the devil is fool enough to pay for it,” he said, “but you shall never sell the throat of Pippa’s child like any trapped nightingale’s.”
Poor Lippo sighed and yielded; it was one of those things in which his own good sense and calm wisdom had to let themselves be overborne by this brother’s impetuous unreason. The churches — even the great ones — pay but a few pence; it was not worth while risking for a few coppers, or for an uncertain future, that lucrative, “half of my half” off the rich fields and vine‐paths of the Artimino mountain.
So Signa sang here and there, a few times in the year, in the little choirs about the Lastra for nothing at all but the love of it; and in the Holy Week sang in the church of the Misericordia, where one of his chief haunts and sweetest pleasures was found at all times.
It is the only church within the Lastra walls, the parish church being outside upon the hills, and very little used. It is a small place, grey and grim of exterior, with its red door veils hanging down much worn, and having, within, its altar piece by Cimabue, only shown on high and holy feasts; no religious building in this country, however lowly, is quite without some treasure of the kind.
The church fills to overflowing at high mass, and the people stand on the steps and in the street, and the sound of the chanting and the smoke of the incense, and the tinkle of the little bells come out on to the air over the bowed heads, and with them there mingle all sweet common country sounds, from bleating sheep and rushing winds, and watch‐dogs baying afar off, and heaving ropes grating boats against the bridge; and the people murmur their prayers in the sun, and bow and kneel and go home comforted, if they know not very well why they are so.
Above the body of the church, led up to by a wooden staircase, there are the rooms of the Fraternity to which all good men and true belong for the love of the poor and the service of heaven. Rooms divided into little cells, each with the black robes and mask of a brother of the order in it; and black‐lettered lines of Scripture above, and the crossbones of death; and closets where the embroidered banners are, and the sacred things for holy offices, and the black velvet pall, with its memento mori and its golden skulls, that covers each brother on his last travel to his latest rest.
Here, in the stillness and the silence, with these symbols of death everywhere around, there dwelt at this time in the dull songless church a man who, in his day, had been a careless wandering singer, loving his art honestly, though himself one of the lowliest of her servitors.
Born in the Lastra, with a sweet voice and an untrained love of harmony, his tastes had led him to wander away from it, and join one of the troops of musicians who make the chance companies in the many small theatres that are to be found in the Italian towns which lie out of the great highways, and are hardly known by name, except in their own commune. He had never risen high in his profession, though a favourite in the little cities, but had always wandered about from season to season from playhouse to playhouse; and in the middle way of his career a drenching in a rain‐storm, after a burning day, had made his throat mute and closed his singing life forever. He had returned to his birthplace, and there joining the Misericordia, had become organist and sacristan to their church in the Lastra, and had stayed in those offices some thirty years, and now was over seventy; a silent, timid, old creature usually, but of a gentle temper, and liking nothing better than to recall the days of his wanderings as a singer, or to linger over the keys of his old organ with some world‐forgotten score before him.
There was little scope for his fondness for melody in the Lastra. It was only in Holy Week that he could arrange any choral service; or once in two or three years, perhaps, there would come such a chance for him as he had had on that day of Corpus Domini when the bishop’s visit had brought about an unusual greatness of ceremonial.
At all other times all he could ever do was to play a few symphonies or fugues at high mass, and if any village child had a great turn for melody, teach it the little science that he knew, as he taught Signa; Signa who was so docile a pupil that he would have knelt in happy obedience to the whip which S. Gregory bought for his scholars — only he never would have merited it for the transgressions of singing out of time.
The stillness, the sadness, the seclusion, where no sound came unless it were some tolling bell upon the hills, the melancholy associations of the place, which all spoke of pain, of effort, of sorrow, of the needs of the poor, and of the warnings of the grave, all these fostered the dreamful temper of the boy, and the thoughtful‐ ness which was beyond his years; and he passed many a happy tranquil hour listening to the old man playing, or trying to reproduce upon his lute, as best he might, themes of the musicians of earlier generations — from the figure of Merula — from the airs of Zingarelli — from the Stabat Mater of Jesi — from the Benedictus of Jomelli — from the Credo of Perez — from the Cantata of Porpora — knowing nothing of their names or value, but finding out their melodies and meanings by sheer instinct.
Luigi Dini — whom everyone called Gigi — had many a crabbed old score and fine sonata and cantata copied out by his own hands, and the child, having been taught his notes, had grown able to find his way in this labyrinth, and pick out beautiful things from the dust of ages by ear and instinct, and make them all his own, as love appropriates whatever it worships; and never knew, as he went over the stones of the Lastra with the donkey, and woke the people in their beds with his clear voice, whilst all was dark, and only he and the birds were astir, that when he was singing the great Se circa, se dice, or the mighty Misero pargoletto, or the delicious Quelli‐là, or the tender Deh signore! he was giving out to the silent street, and the dreaming echoes, and the wakening flush of day, air
s that had been the rapture of the listening world a century before.
Grave Gregorian melodies; Laudi of Florentiae laudisti of the Middle Ages; hymns from the monasteries, modelled on the old Greek traditions, with “the note the slave of the word;” all things simple, pure, and old filled the manuscripts of the sacristy like antique jewels. Signa, very little, very ignorant, very helpless, strayed amongst them confused and unconscious of the value of the things he played with, and yet got the good out of them and felt their richness and was nourished on the strength of them, and ran away to them at every stolen moment that he could, while Luigi Dini stood by and listened, and was moved at the wonderful instinct of the child, as the Romans were moved at the young Mozart’s rendering of the Allegri requiem.
Music was in the heart and the brain of the child; his feet moved to it over the dusty roads, his heavy burdens were lightened by it, and, when they scolded him, often he did not hear — there were so many voices singing to him. Where did the voices come from? he did not know; only he heard them when he lay awake in the straw, beside the other boys, with the stars shining through the unglazed window of the roof, as he heard them when the hot noon was bright and still on the hill‐top where he strayed all alone with his sheep.
One day he found the magical voices shut up in a little brown prison of wood, as a great soul ere now has been pent in a mean little body; — one day, a wonderful day, after which all the world changed for him.
In a little shop in the Lastra by the Porta Fiorentina, there was a violin for sale. A violin in pear‐wood, with a shell inlaid upon its case, and reputed to be very, very old.
Tonino, the locksmith and tinman, had it. So many years before that he could not count them a lodger had left it with him in default of rent, and never gone back for it. The violin lay neglected in the dust of an old cupboard. One day a pedlar had spied it and offered ten francs for it. Tonino said to himself, if a pedlar would give that, it must be worth four times the sum at least, and put it in his window with his old keys and his new saucepans, and his ancient locks and his spick and span bright coffee pots; a little old dusky window just within the tall east gateway of the Lastra, where the great poplars throw their welcome shadow across the sunny road.
Signa going on an errand there one day and left alone in the shop took it up and began to make the strings sound, not knowing how, but finding the music out for himself as they young Pascal found the science of mathematics.
When Tonino entered his workshop, with a pair of hot pincers in his hand, he was frightened to death to hear the sweetest sounds dancing about the air like butterflies, and when he discovered that he child was playing on his precious violin that the pedlar would give ten francs for, he hardly knew whether to kiss the child for being so clever or whether to pinch him with the red hot nippers for his im‐ pudence. Anyhow he snatched the violin from him and put it in the window again.
A thing that could make so sweet a noise must be worth double what he thought.
So he put a price of forty francs upon it, and stuck it amongst his tins, hoping to sell it; dealers or gentlefolks came sometimes up and down the Lastra, seeing if there were any pretty or ancient thing to buy, for the people have beautiful old work very often in lace, in majolica, in carvings, in missals, in repoussé, in copper and can be cheated out of these with an ease that quite endears them to those who do it.
A few people looked at Tonino’s violin, but no one bought it; because the right people did not see it, or because it was an old violin without any special grace of Cremona or value of Bologna on its case. As it lay there in the window amongst the rusty iron and the shining tin things, with the dust drifting over it, and the flies buzzing about its strings, Signa saw it twenty times a week, and sighed his little soul out for it.
Oh the unutterable wonder locked up in that pear‐wood case! oh, the deep undreamed‐of joys that lay in those mute strings!
The child thought of nothing else. After those murmurs of marvellous meanings that had come to him when touching that strange thing, he dreamed of it by day and night. The lute was dear to him; but what was the power of the lute beside those heights and depths of sound that this unknown creature could give? — for a living creature it was to him, as much as was the redbreast or thrush.
Only to touch it again! just once to touch it again!
He begged and prayed Tonino; but the tinman was inexorable. he could not risk his bit of property in such babyish hands. True the child had made the music jump out of it; but that might have been an accident, and who could tell that another time he would not break it — a little beggar’s brat like that, without people to pay for it if any damage were done.
“Give me my forty francs and you shall have it, piccinino,” Tonino would say with a grin, knowing that he might as well tell the child to bring him down the star‐dust from the skies.
Signa would go away with his little head hung down; the longing for the violin possessing him with a one‐idea’d passion. In the young child with whom genius is born its vague tumultuous desires work without his knowing what it is that ails him.
The children laughed at him, the old people scolded him, Nita beat him, Bruno even grew impatient with him because he was always sighing for an old fiddle, that it was as absurd for him to dream of as it were a king’s sword or a queen’s pearls.
“As if he were not lazy and tiresome enough as it is!” said Nita, boxing his ears soundly, when she went by one evening and caught him leaning against Tonino’s casement and looking with longing, pitiful, ardent eyes at the treasure in its pear‐wood shell.
After a time the child, shy and proud in temper, grew ashamed of his own enthusiasm, and hid it from the others, and never any more tried to soften Tonino’s heart and get leave to touch that magical bow again.
Bruno thought he had forgotten it and was glad. The violin lay with the metal pots and the rusty locks, and no one brought it. Signa when he had to go past, on an errand through the gate, to Castagnolo or S. Maria del Greve, or any other eastward village, tried not to look at the brown shining wood that the wasps and the mosquitoes were humming over at their will. But he longed for it the more because he kept the longing silent, and had no chance of ever feeling those keys of enchantment under his little fingers. A thing repressed, grows.
He would lie awake at night thinking of the violin; if it had not been so wicked he would have stolen something to buy it with; some days it was all he could do to keep himself from stealing it itself.
One bright afternoon in especial, when everyone was at a marionette show in the square, and he had come back very foot‐sore from the city, and passing saw Tonino’s place was empty and the old lattice windows were open and the sun’s rays fell across the violin, it would have been the work of a second to put his hand in, and draw it out, and run off — anywhere — any‐ where, what would it have mattered where, if only he had carried all that music with him?
For genius is fanaticism; and the little barefoot hungry fellow, running errands in the dust, had genius in him, and was tossed about by it like a small moth by a storm.
To run away and wander, with the violin to talk to him wherever he might go: — the longing to do this tortured him so that he clasped his hands over his eyes and fled — without it — as fast as his feet could take him.
To see it lying dumb when at his touch it would say such beautiful things to him! — he ran on through the gateway and down the road with the burning temptation pursuing him as prairie flames a frightened fawn.
If any one had had it who could have made it speak he would not have minded; but that it should lie mute there — useless — lost — hurt him with a sharper pain than Nita’s hazel rods could deal.
“Oh Gemma — almost I stole it!” he gasped, panting and breathless with the horror of himself, as he stumbled up against the pretty child on the green strip that runs under the old south wall, where the breaches made by the Spanish assaults are filled in with ivy, and the ropemakers walk to and fro, w
eaving their strands under the ruined bastions.
Gemma put her finger in her mouth and looked at him.
“Why not quite?” she said. Gemma had stolen many things in her day, and had always been forgiven because she was so pretty.
“Oh, Gemma, I did — so nearly!” he murmured, unheeding her answer in the confusion of his own new stricken sense of peril and escape.
“Was it to eat?” said Gemma.
“To eat?”
He echoed her words without knowing what he said. Two great tears were rolling down his cheeks. He was so grateful that strength for resistance had been given him; and yet, he was thinking of a song of the country to a lute; which
* Oh quanto suoni bene chitarruzza! Le tui corde si possono indorare! Lo manico diventi una fanciulla! E dove io vada ti posso menare Ch’io ti posso menar da qui a Roma E monti e sassi t’abbiano a inchinare! TUSCAN SERENADE.
sings of how its owner would gild its strings and wander with it even as far as Rome — mountains and rocks inclining before its silver sounds.
If only he could have that beautiful strange thing, he thought, how he would roam the world over fearing nothing, or how happy he would lie down among the sheep and the pines, for ever making music to the winds.
“Why did you not take it, if nobody was by to see,” said Gemma.
“Oh dear, it is wicked to thieve,” said Signa, drearily. “Wicked, you know, and mean.”
Gemma put out her lower lip.
“If no one know, it is all right,” she said, with accurate perception of the world’s standard of virtue.
Signa sighed heavily, his head hung down; he hardly heard her; he was thinking of the violin.
“You are a mammamia,” said Gemma, with calm scorn, meaning he was a baby and very silly. “When I wish to do a thing, I do it.”